Mexican architecture was also enriched by an architect-engineer of genius, Felix Candela, whose work with delicate concrete shell-vaults from the 1950s was globally influential. His is the 1968 Olympic Stadium in Mexico City, though his early churches show him at his most lyrical. Concrete, so often the material of choice for developing countries because it is cheap, plentiful and tolerant of relatively unskilled handling, achieved a level of refinement in the hands of Candela that was very different from the glorification of beton brut by Le Corbusier.

It is a bit of a truism to state that modern Mexican architecture responds to its climate by tending to exalt the wall over the window. It is true that this is the legacy of Barragan and the approach of Ricardo Legorreta, whose Managua Cathedral is an exercise in the relationship of sheer mass and light, and whose impending Mexican Museum in San Francisco is not afraid to be a solid, largely blank-walled, object. You will even find Legorreta's work in London, at his little Fashion Museum in Bermondsey for Zandra Rhodes, completed externally but still not open to the public. It was his use of rich colour that caught Rhodes' attention.